Contact Directory Database - Pull Unique Values

[Call-911]

Hello All,

 

I have a contact directory database. It has all the employees of my company (name, phone, email, department, building, etc).

 

Say on one page I have the Marketing Department, and I want to say:

"The Marketing Department Director is ________"

 

How would I assign that value from the database? Do I want to put in a unique "keyword" field in the database, but then how would I store all the values automatically on the page?

 

I see pages where I would want to list the Marketing Director, and his secretary, then another page with the Sales Director, and his secretary, etc....  all with being able to change the values in the database, and it changing across all the pages instantly.

 

Do I need to say on every page "select * from database where keyword = marketingdirector" and then store that result as a variable? It seems unpractical to repeat that a few times for each different person I want to list.

 

Is there a better way to do this then I'm thinking?

 

Thanks all!

[onlyican]

You have to look at the bigger picture

IF every category as

CATEGORY Director

CATEGORY Secretary

 

then you can do a simple solution of having an INT in the table for ranking

1 = DIRECTOR

2 = SECRETARY

ect ect

 

If the position can be different per category a better solution

Still keep the Ranking

1 = TOP DOG

2 = NEXT ONE DOWN

then also have a varchar containing there rank

 

Order by the rank, get the rank name and sorted.

[Call-911]

But then how would I only choose one value on a page and not all. Say I want to have a marketing director's bio page. I only want to select his row from the database and stored as a value, not all 2000 staff.

 

I want to use one database for everything, but then pull out people as needed.

 

The only way I can figure out how to do that is to do a "SELECT * FROM table WHERE keyword = 'marketingdirectory'"

 

But I don't want to do for every single person I need to show.

[Muddy_Funster]

there is no better way than to do it by

Select name, phone, email, department, building FROM tablename WHERE criteria is met

There are otther ways of doing it, but not better ones.  You could do a single SELECT statement on a page of it's own which can populate an array, you could then pass this array to $_SESSION and reffer back to it from any page.  But you would only do that if you wanted to use massive amounts of bandwith and grind your site to a halt.

 

What is your issue with selecting only what you need, only when you need it?  Why does that not strike you as the most sensible way to do things?